> About $2.4 billion out of this is already frozen by Circle and Tether. Some of the big ones:
How does freezing crypto work in this context?
> About $2.4 billion out of this is already frozen by Circle and Tether. Some of the big ones:
How does freezing crypto work in this context?
The smart contract for those tokens supports freezing. Tether just calls the freeze function on that address.
Can they forcibly reverse the transaction so that Binance gets their money back?
No. The last time this happened, it led to the Ethereum/Ethereum classic split, and that was 10 years ago.
However, the stablecoins are not “real” cryptocurrencies like e.g. BTC or ETH, but are built as smartcontracts on top of ETH, basically using it as a big replicated database. So they might(?) just manually “give back” the money to Binance, as in freezing money in the stolen account forever and “printing” an equal amount to Binance's credit.
Or, to put it in another way, no need to reverse an erroneous SQL transaction if you can just create a new one that fixes the data you altered.
And it's impossible to mix them because Ethereum is even anonymous than Bitcoin.
How so? If anything, Ethereum can host trustless mixers more easily than Bitcoin due to its smart contract execution being Turing complete.
Isn't it already too late at that point? The tokens would have moved already.
I think the idea is that they freeze them indefinitely, and then they no longer count against the centralised reserves, since they can never cash out. Now they can mint the equivalent amount back to Binance and remain solvent.
And how do they ‘mint’ 2 billion without affecting the price of tether and without finding 2 billion to back it?
If they can mint with no impact doesn’t that mean they can just print money?
It’s been years since anything Tether minted was plausibly 100% backed by real assets. Both times they’ve been forced to show the books, they only had fractional backing. And they’ve minted tens of billions of tokens since.
And yet people like the parent and those with billions invested in Tether seem to believe that it's all backed and fully solvent and minting new money from thin air is completely reasonable.
It's remarkable to me how long this scam has lasted and how much confidence people have in it, in spite of the very shady characters involved and the likelihood of fraud.
Personally I'm skeptical of Tether. But you don't need to trust them to believe that if they permanently freeze Z USDT and then mint Z USDT then their ratio of reserves to USDT is unchanged.
Because if they permanently freeze 2 billion in a wallet, that Tether can never move or cash out, so their liabilities go down 2 billion. They can mint an equivalent amount to a non-frozen wallet without affecting their reserve ratio.
And yes they can print money, you have to trust their reserves that are off chain.
To be clear: There is no permanently frozen guarantee. Tether can and has unfrozen (called removeBlackList)addresses before. All of this is just a public database fully controlled by Tether Limited.
Moved where? Moving to a different wallet wouldn't prevent freezing. It's 5B, impossible to cash out or exchange for different crypto quickly.
Excluding wash and artificial activity, supposedly stablecoins trade 400M/h so if it took 2h to notice and lock they might have been able trade about half a billion without overwhelming existing volumes?
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/stablecoin... (I didn't verify per-stablecoin volume, or actual volume at those hours, or typical volume for those exact hours, which a better analysis would have done.)
here's an interesting article by DataFinnovation arguing that blacklisting crypto is doomed to fail.
https://medium.com/chainargos/losing-the-blacklisting-race-e...
right but too late to call freeze on the original wallet address as per gp's post. I would imagine it got distributed to many wallets and attempts to tumble by the time Tether could move on it.
they took loan against it.
Most crypto assets are operated by a smart contract that controls every transfer. So the contract can decide to not perform certain transfers.
Not your keys, not your crypto.
Keys? Hahaha, still not your crypto.
Unless it's Monero, the only currency to be declared illegal in most countries because it's too much like cash.
Monero is legal in most countries.
Like cash except you can use it at crazy scale, so worse than cash when crime is considered.
That's why it's paramount for LEOs to go after people doing the bad deeds instead of simply banning a whole monetary ecosystem, just because it's easier to do.
If you ban a coin, instead of persuing the actual criminal, then you're both doing a disservice to honest users of the coin and leaving the bad actor to do harm to society in some other way.
There are only 8B people in the world - they all fit into a "box" of 2k by 2k by 2k of humans.
It really isn't that hard to know who's doing bad things to others, especially with current technology.
No, it's exactly why that works.
Criminals used to meet in person to discuss crime (because mail/phones can be intercepted) and meet in person to move cash. It was a hard limiting factor on what they can get away with. With e2e messengers and anonymous crypto both of those "issues" are fixed.
Do you know anyone who uses it for legit purposes? I don't. I bet you ban a coin like that and you kill orders of magnitude more crime revenue compared to .001% of honest users using it to send money home and save a few dollars on the transaction.
It really is hard, because time isn’t addressed in the idea.
It is an evolutionary process, with incentives are high enough for both sides to keep finding solutions.
It doesn't, the hacker already loaned against it to get eth so they froze saves assets.